Note 1. Although this poem did not come to its birthday until December 16, 1873, when Mr. Emerson read it in Faneuil Hall, on the Centennial Celebration of the destruction of the tea in Boston Harbor, it was conceived years before. Mr. Emerson wrote in his journal in 1842: I have a kind of promise to write, one of these days, a verse or two to the praise of my native city, which in common days we often rail at, yet which has great merits to usward. That too, like every city, has certain virtues, as a museum of the arts. The parlors of private collectors, the Athenæum Gallery, and the college become the city of the city. Then a city has this praise, that as the bell or band of music is heard outside beyond the din of carts, so the beautiful in architecture, or in political and social institutions, endures; all else comes to nought, so that the antiquities and permanent things in each city are good and fine. On his walks with his children on Sunday afternoons Mr. Emerson would often recite poetry to them, and they remember well his telling of his desire to write his Boston poem, and his pleasure in this image,

And twice a day the flowing sea

Takes Boston in its arms.

In his manuscript it opens thus:

The land that has no song

Shall have a song to-day:

The granite hills are dumb too long,

The vales have much to say:

For you can teach the lightning speech,

And round the globe your voices reach.

Mr. Emerson was never able to finish the poem to his satisfaction. He wished to have a sort of refrain of two rhyming lines at the end of each verse, but after his illness in 1872 his powers of composition failed, and but a portion of his verses were thus rounded out. The poem appeared first in print in the Atlantic Monthly for February, 1876, and in Mr. Emersons Selected Poems, published the same year, it was the concluding poem. The motto of Boston, which precedes the poem, he translates thus in the last verse,

Note 2. The poem was begun in the sad days preceding the war, when its author blushed for the timidity shown by many of Bostons first citizens, scholars and merchants, and their subservience in the interests of union and commerce to the demands made by the slave-power upon their honor and conscience. When the war had cleared the air, the poem was quite remodelled in a happier day, for the Boston Tea-Party celebration. The following are some of the verses, composed at a sadder time, which, in the early form, followed the lines on Lafayette:

O pity that I pause!

The song, disdaining, shuns

To name the noble sires because

Of the unworthy sons;

For what avail the plough or sail,

Or land or life, if freedom fail?

But there was chaff within the flour,

And one was false in ten,

And reckless clerks in lust of power

Forgot the rights of men;

Cruel and blind did file their mind,

And sell the blood of human kind.

Your town is full of gentle names

By patriots once were watchwords made;

Those war-cry names are muffled shames

On recreant sons mislaid.

What slave shall dare a name to wear

Once Freedoms passport everywhere?

Oh welaway! if this be so,

And man cannot afford the right,

And if the wage of love be woe,

And honest dealing yield despite.

For never will die the captives cry

On the echoes of God till Right draws nigh.

Here is a verse written at another time of patriotic mortification:

O late to learn, O long betrayed,

O credulous men of toil,

Who took the traitor to your hearths

Who came those hearths to spoil.

O much-revering Boston town

Who let the varlet still

Recite his false, insulting tale

On haughty Bunker Hill.

The following fragment in lighter vein also occurs in the verse-book:

O Boston city, lecture-hearing,

O Unitarian, God-fearing,

But more, I fear, bad men revering,

Too civil by half; thine evil guest

Makes thee his byword and his jest,

And scorns the men that honeyed the pest,

Piso and Atticus with the rest.

Thy fault is much civility,

Thy bane respectability,

And thou hadst been as wise and wiser

Lacking the Daily Advertiser.

Ah, gentlemenfor you are gentle

And mental maids, not sentimental

In the volume called Natural History of Intellect and Other Papers, is included Mr. Emersons lecture Boston, in which he shows his pride and interest in his native town. Mrs. Ednah Cheney contributed an interesting chapter on Emerson and Boston to the book published in 1885 by the Concord School of Philosophy, called Genius and Character of Emerson. [back]